Activity based costing as a marketing tool

In a competitive scenario, characterized by quick changes, firms need to place side by side cost leadership and focus strategies, pursuing the customer value creation and complying with the cost constraint. In this context management needs effective tools to co-ordinate marketing, which runs customer value creation, and control, which manages the costs which firm has to bear to produce this value. The aim of this theoretic study is to analyze the Activity Based Costing (ABC) evolution from cost accounting methodology to management tool focusing on the role of activity based information for marketing. So the paper discusses these topics: Activity based costing supports effective marketing decision making in different context: marketing processes restructuring, marketing mix choices and pricing; ABC is also an effective tool to manage customer profitability because it measures costs for customer, or customer class, it gives evidence to the variables that affect customer profitability and it supports price differentiation for customer classes; Activity based costing makes possible the integration between marketing and control.